Silver Clipboard

How Ubiquitous Capture is Vital for Creative Work

Scheduling creativity is a fool’s task. You can’t sit at a computer and decide ‘now is the time I will be creative’. However you can force yourself to work on existing projects.

Ideas appear when the neurons firing in your brain make a new connection. Creativity is random. The good news is you don’t have to do anything to make it happen. The bad news is that you can’t force it to happen.

In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King describes the creative process as it happened to him while working as a handyman at his old high school.

One day [Harry, a coworker] and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room… There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls.. I asked what was in them. “Pussy plugs,” Harry said. “For them certain days of the month.”

I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. You could actually shower in privacy.

…I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the others girls — grossed out, horrified, amused — start pelting her with sanitary napkins… The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death. She reacts, fights back, but how?

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena… There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first— Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescence cruelty and telekinesis, came together and I had an idea.

That idea eventually grew in to his first novel, Carrie and started his prolific career. But Stephen King wasn’t trying to come up with an idea for a book. It just happened because creativity is random.

The fleeting, random nature of thoughts is what makes ubiquitous capture is so important. When an idea pops into your head, no matter how important or trivial, or how good or poor, write it down immediately. You should keep a pad of paper on you at all times to capture ideas.

Even though creativity is beyond your control, if you practice ubiquitous capture you will always have a stock of ideas to draw from when you sit down to work. Once you get into the habit of capture, you will discover that it is a self-feeding process. The more you capture your ideas, the more aware you become of your own thoughts and the more you have to capture. Get a notepad and get to work.

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Photograph by Chris Metcalf